"Oh, Lilian, what a color you are! Blue-white, ghastly, your face all drawn, pinched--magnificent! Let me see your hands and nails. Ah, capital! Capital! Poor little Lilian! But if you must faint, what a chance for me! I couldn't think how I was to get the right tint for my dying soldier. I never saw any one dead or wounded, and I am much too stolid ever to faint myself. Crossing the channel I took my hand-mirror and studied my face when I was desperately sick--but it was all green and pathos--no good! But your color's the very thing--only you get pink so fast! Oh, Lilian, if ever you faint again, have me called the very instant you feel yourself going off!" This may be called devotion to one's work? But grand work she's going to do. She's full of genius, and has only to get over the niminy-piminy-izing of the South Kensington School, and work abroad a few years, to have a far more justly grounded fame than Rosa Bonheur's. Already a few first great drops of her shower are falling. She's a picture in the Academy, her first, and _on the line_--a picture to which the hanging committee themselves took off their hats, and gave a cheer for the artist; and a regular ovation she had on the private view day--nobility and clergy, fellow artists and journalists, army and navy--such a day as she says can never come again for her, let the future have what success in store for her it may. She has sold the picture for a thousand guineas, and her sketch in the Black and White Exhibition has appeared in one of the illustrated papers, the same paper offering her _carte-blanche_ for illustrations. How I feel like swinging her in triumph before the faces of Mesdames Malise and her friends!--a simple, frank, good girl, who never in her life thought of crying out about a career, and a smoothing of her way, or declared her right to devote herself to art, and to such an unwomanly branch of it as the drawing of horses and soldiers, but set herself obscurely at work, and toiled as faithfully as if she hadn't a spark of genius in her--to win what she has already done, and yet will do!